Deep Valley **** (1947, Ida Lupino, Dane Clark, Wayne Morris) Classic Movie Review 9,985

Warner Bros’ classy 1947 action crime drama film Deep Valley stars Ida Lupino as shy farmer’s daughter Libby Saul, who shelters wild escaped chain-gang convict Barry Burnette (Dane Clark). 

Director Jean Negulesco’s 1947 action crime drama film Deep Valley stars Ida Lupino as shy farmer’s daughter Libby Saul, who shelters wild escaped chain-gang convict Barry Burnette (Dane Clark) working on a new road, and has a touching awakening. Wayne Morris plays upstanding engineer Jeff Barker, who makes the moves on Libby.

This movingly acted, classy little melodrama is greatly helped by its all-location filming, the result of a Warner Bros studio strike. It was compared with an earlier Warner Bros / Lupino outing, the similar High Sierra (1941), but it has an odd vitality of its own and it is one of Lupino’s finest hours. The cinematography by Ted McCord and music by Max Steiner are special too.

The screenplay by Salka Viertel and Stephen Morehouse Avery is based on the novel by Dan Totheroh.

Also in the cast are Fay Bainter as Ellie Saul, Henry Hull as Cliff Saul, Willard Robertson as Sheriff Akers, Rory Mallinson as Foreman, Jack Mower as Supervisor and John Alvin as Convict.

Deep Valley is directed by Jean Negulesco, runs 104 minutes, is made and released by Warner Bros, is written Salka Viertel and Stephen Morehouse Avery, based on the novel by Dan Totheroh, is shot in black and white by Ted McCord, is produced by Henry Blanke, and is scored by Max Steiner.

It is shot in Big Bear Lake, California. Perhaps because of the all-location filming, production went 40 days over schedule.

It opened on August 22, 1947 in New York City and overall took $1.4 million in the US.

It was intended for Ann Sheridan, Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield.

Ida Lupino (4 February 1918 – 3 August 1995).

Lupino’s star career was going really well but she was unhappy with her situation at Warner Bros and turned down a contract extension, which may have been a mistake. She often angered studio boss Jack Warner by objecting to her casting, refusing poorly written roles or making script revisions, spending much of her time on suspension at Warner Bros, which she left in 1947. Her short yet influential career as a film director included becoming the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker, in 1953. She also directed more than 100 episodes of TV shows and continued acting in a successful TV career in the Sixties and Seventies.

Austrian actress and Hollywood screenwriter Salka Viertel (15 June 1889 – 20 October 1978) co-wrote the scripts for many movies under her contract with MGM from 1933 to 1937, including Queen Christina (1933), The Painted Veil (1934), Anna Karenina (1935), Conquest (1937) and Two-Faced Woman (1941), all starring her close friend Greta Garbo. She also played opposite Garbo in MGM’s German-language version of Anna Christie in 1930.

Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945) is a fictional version of working with Salka Viertel’s husband Berthold Viertel. The Viertels’ house in Santa Monica Canyon was an important meeting place for Hollywood intellectuals and European immigrants. After their divorce in 1947, Salka left the US in 1953 and settled in Klosters in Switzerland, where later, her son author and screenwriter Peter Viertel (16 November 1920 – 4 November 2007) and his second wife Deborah Kerr lived.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9,985

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